Histoire Reading Order

Histoire (1967) by Claude Simon is the most autobiographical of his major novels and, for many readers, the most moving. Structured as a single very long day in a garden — the narrator, who has returned to his family home after years away, sorts through a box of old postcards written by his parents and relatives across several decades — the novel builds, from these fragments, a portrait of a family across generations: his mother (who died when he was young), his father (killed in the Great War before he was born), an uncle and various relatives. The postcards are the novel's structural and emotional pivot: each one, with its fragment of handwriting, its specific date and location, and its incomplete message, is a survival from a world that no longer exists, and the narrator's attempt to reconstruct from these fragments the people who wrote them is the same attempt that the novel's prose enacts — to recover from incomplete evidence a human reality that was never fully accessible even to those who lived it. Histoire won the Prix Médicis in 1967 and is the novel in which Simon most fully achieves the integration of the Nouveau Roman formal technique with an emotional depth that some readers found lacking in the earlier works. The long sentences are still there — unpunctuated, circling — but they are informed by a grief that gives them urgency.